Notes on Notes

I wrapped up Notes from Underground while traveling yesterday. It’s not terribly long, and I figured I’d be able to finish it during one of my flights.

One of the things I’ve been using an LLM for (I favor Claude, which I’ve mentioned here before) is to set the table for some books before I start them - historical context, whether or not there are theological themes to be aware of, that sort of thing. I might ask a few more questions, skim the Foreword, and then dive in. This one was no exception, and it was good to go into Notes knowing that it was a reaction piece to Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? which went on to become something of a classic in the Soviet canon. Reading it as an extended meditation which answers “fat chance” to engineered Utopias is profitable for sure.

Then I started the book and instead found myself imagining that I was reading someone’s blog instead and…it felt pretty contemporary. You could probably break each section of part 1 into separate posts, throw them on a Substack, and generate a fair bit of engagement. And the Underground Man’s rant starts to sound sort of coherent towards the end - that if you engineer away human needs and provide everything that is formulated to make us happy, we will almost certainly destroy it, just to feel a sense of agency again.

Then you get to part 2 - the memoir portion - to see just how horrible this ends up looking. The line between Underground Man and the murder in Crime and Punishment is straight, short, and bright. Poor Liza; I hope she eventually finds peace and warmth. Without the transcendent, the world is a bleak, bleak place where the monotony is broken only by the violence required to feel something, anything.

Notes completes the Doestoevsky arc for now. I will probably revisit Crime and Punishment and Karamazov again in the future, perhaps with different translations. As it is, I’m satisfied to leave 19th century Russia behind for a bit.